=Disadvantages of the Only Child.=--In the individualistic family of the modern monogamic type the chief need is for every child to have brothers and sisters or at least a brother or sister. The "one-child" plan, which places a solitary little creature as sole recipient of money, affection, and care of the household, is one that shows poverty of condition for the child concerned, no matter how rich the parents. Such a child lacks a chief aid in its development. Nature sometimes sends, even in a large family, all boys or all girls and makes coeducation at the start difficult. Usually, however, when there are two, three, four, or more children they are mixed in due and helpful proportion. When the family is too large, as it so often was in the older days, it must subdivide according to ages and tastes, and in many old-fashioned families some brothers and sisters were near in sympathy and love and others wide apart. In the moderate-size modern family, however, where there is enough companionship within the home for family good times and not enough to cause breakage into groups within the group, we have the ideal conditions for child development. For the only child there are happily some substitutes for this home companionship in the "residential school," or the school with long days of group relationship of like age and condition, but it is not the same and seldom as good as the home circle of the right size and variety. The modern conditions make the old ties seem less important to many. In the United States, where people move about so freely across the vast spaces of our continent, and where in the large cities so many move each year to try vainly to better themselves in hired houses, the ties of family outside of the immediate circle seem remote and to be easily set aside. It is not, however, a sign of advanced social spirit which makes a young girl declare "she has no use for her relations; she cares only for her chosen friends," and it is often of the essence of social danger that a young man wants to give up all connection with his family. The fact is that one can understand better how one came to be what one is by knowing something of one's forbears and one's living relatives.